Techniques for improving developers' working efficiency in each stage of system development have been proposed. For example, Japanese Published Patent Application No. 2000-235485 discloses a method of reducing the workload by creating a scenario based on a degree of association between a use case and an API in the system designing stage using APIs.
Moreover, in a stage of testing a system, a tool for performing an interactive API test by means of GUI (Graphical User Interface) has been used. According to such a tool, an API is executed by manually inputting the respective input data (parameters) or reading a file in which the input data have been registered beforehand. In addition, input data and output data can be stored in files, and/or comparison of test data can be performed.
However, if the number of input data for an API and the number of digits thereof are large, the input data may be erroneously entered, and correction thereof may take time. In such a situation, no method has been provided to automatically use the input and output data of the executed APIs as the input data of the succeeding APIs even when there are associations of input and output data between a plurality of APIs (e.g., output data of a previous API becomes input data of a succeeding API).
Further, in the test of software which executes a plurality of APIs according to business processing (scenario), it is difficult to appropriately select an API depending on a situation from among a large number of APIs. Although the method described in Japanese Published Patent Application No. 2000-235485 can extract a scenario associated with the API from information on a given use case, no method is provided to indicate a candidate for a succeeding API in generating and testing a new scenario.